XyWrite to Word

["Thomas J Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Michael Norman  on Fri, 24 Mar 2006
11:01:20 -0500

> For those of us who must use M$Word with students, clients and so
> forth, is there a book(s) that can help make us "experienced users,"
> guides to shorts cuts, customizations, keyboard reconfigurations,
> make the program more XY-like?

Michael's post raises another Word problem: the difficulty of getting
good information about how Word works and how to implement best practices.
It's a mystery to me how a program with hundreds of millions of users can
be so poorly documented, but indeed it is.

There are, of course, plenty of Word books on the shelf. Most are simply
explanations of how to find your way around the dumbed-down, poorly
designed, and in some cases downright dangerous menu system which
Microsoft provides to give average people some hope of manipulating the
sophisticated Word object model. But just learning the menus doesn't get
you far; in fact, it probably empowers you to begin doing dumb things that
lead to unstable documents and much frustration.

The best Word book I know of is "Extending the Power of Word 2002"
published in 2001 by Perfect Access Speer, and arm of the Kaplan training
group. The ISBN is 0X-8022090-2, but you'll have a hard time finding it.
Perfect Access used to sell it directly and used it in their corporate
Word classes, but I never saw it anywhere else. From the introduction:
"This book's focus--unlike other "how-to" books that cover all the ways
to do things--is on teaching you the correct way to use Word 2002 in a
business environment where complex documents are part of the fabric."

"Word 2000 in a Nutshell" by Walter Glenn (O'Reilly; still in print) is
not bad and is still quite useful even though it's two versions behind.
"Word Hacks", another O'Reilly title by Andrew Savikas, is full of things
to do to make Word more useful, and will give you some good insights about
what's going on under the hood.

As for online resources, there are a few listservs and bulletin boards
where good advice can be had if you're willing to put up with the
accompanying chatter of the masses of clueless people thrashing around in
the program. So far as I know, there is no equivalent to the gold
standard of intelligent word processing discussion represented by the
XyWrite listserv in earlier years.

Microsystems (www.microsystems.com), a consultancy which provides
sophisticated Word support to large law firms and the like, makes some of
its material available to the public (click Downloads > Word Resources).
You'll have to complete a short registration form to get access.

Tom Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx